Since it is "the peculiar privilege of reason to move within herself, and to be proof against corporeal impressions, suffering neither sensation nor passion to break in upon her," it follows that the true interest of the spirit must ever be to treat the body--Well! as a corpse attached thereto, rather than as a living companion--nay, actually to promote its dissolution.

In counterpoise to the inhumanity of this, presenting itself to the young reader as nothing less than a sin against nature, the very person of Cornelius was nothing less than a sanction of that reverent delight Marius had always had in the visible body of man.
Such delight indeed had been but [54] a natural consequence of the sensuous or materialistic character of the philosophy of his choice.
Now to Cornelius the body of man was unmistakeably, as a later seer terms it, the one true temple in the world; or rather itself the proper object of worship, of a sacred service, in which the very finest gold might have its seemliness and due symbolic use:--Ah! and of what awe-stricken pity also, in its dejection, in the perishing gray bones of a poor man's grave! Some flaw of vision, thought Marius, must be involved in the philosopher's contempt for it--some diseased point of thought, or moral dulness, leading logically to what seemed to him the strangest of all the emperor's inhumanities, the temper of the suicide; for which there was just then, indeed, a sort of mania in the world.

"'Tis part of the business of life," he read, "to lose it handsomely." On due occasion, "one might give life the slip." The moral or mental powers might fail one; and then it were a fair question, precisely, whether the time for taking leave was not come:--"Thou canst leave this prison when thou wilt.

Go forth boldly!" Just there, in the bare capacity to entertain such question at all, there was what Marius, with a soul which must always leap up in loyal gratitude for mere physical sunshine, touching him as it touched the flies in the air, could not away with.

There, surely, was a sign of some crookedness in the natural power of apprehension.